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When building a civilised area in a M**, builders need to be more wary than they often seem to be. Many times, it appears that builders will create a city, a town, or some other community, and the building could be the most skilful there is, but its just going to look silly if the city has no reason to be there at all.
Builders need to look at real-life communities and realise that these organised arrangements of structures and lives do not occur as if by magic, just because there happens to be room in the nearby countryside for some development. Gatherings of people occur in particular places because something draws those people to that place, in the case of natural features, this might be something such as a nearby river which acts not only as a water-source, but also as a vital incentive to trade and industry.
A builder needs to provide evidence of why a town might have been placed where it is, not necessarily to the point of shouting it at the player, but to the degree that a player might be able to work it out for themselves. Is the town there because a river passes through it that generates trade and tolls, or is it maybe a small town set up to provide support and amenities to the workers of a mining community?
There are a few reasons that a community might set up in a particular area. It might be that a tavern at a busy crossroads eventually became enough of a hub for travellers that more and more traders set up there, and gradually residential dwellings were built. It might be that a community of people wished to break away from society and become secluded and self-sufficient. It might, within the fantasy genre, follow a plot that specifies that a group of magic users simply wished to live where their powers were strongest. However, the main reason that a city occurs, at least in a generic M** would be due to trade.
In this respect therefore, the design of the area needs to follow the natural evolution of a town. A civilisation that has built itself up around the river trade would most likely follow the waterway at first, and only gradually find itself expanding outwards away from it as space becomes a premium. Therefore, one might expect that the buildings along the river would be older and more dilapidated, especially as the effects of a large community living nearby took its toll on the river (waste disposal etc).
The example above is a little specific, but the point of it all is solely that builders need to consider what they are building and why. Its very little use to build a community of elves sitting up in their trees, just because you think that's how elves should live. A builder needs to be able to show a player why the elves are living in their trees, for what reason the entire community has gathered there, and also what adaptations their lives have undergone to place them there.
Another aspect of location for communities is the subject of wares and other objects. Many are the communities where I've not seen a mine that would provide the raw materials for smithing, and yet there is always the customary smith (usually a dwarf) with the prerequisite raw components for his work. It is fair to say that many communities survive by their trade, and this obviously ties into the idea of communities that set up for trade. However, it is preferable that players are able to see where an item is coming from, at least to the degree that maybe a trading caravan passes them now and then, or a shop keeper mentions his suppliers in passing.
Tying into this is the idea of misplaced mobs. For example, where is an elven shopkeeper getting elven blades in his shop that is based in a giant tree (where there are never high winds)? There certainly isn't a forge in the tree anywhere, and there certainly isn't a mine in there either.
Of course, there are going to be discrepancies, and a lot of the time, some things are simply too much hassle to build. No one is expecting builders to 'grow' their areas from the bottom up, but it would be nice to see a significant degree of forethought going into these areas, answering simple questions like:
· Why did these people settle here?
· What has changed since then?
· What are the effects of these changes?
· How do they support themselves?
· Where do they get their raw materials?
· How have they adapted to life in this place?
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